Mindshard (ON HOLD)

Prologue: An Unexpected Encounter

     A concept oft struggled with was the vastness of space.  A great expanse as broad as imagination and as difficult to measure as understanding, it was an idea mortals with mortal minds had attempted to conceptualize to no avail.  There was just no end to it and, based in the finite, the human mind couldn’t fully realize the depth of its existence.

     One undeniable fact about space that humanity had realized was that it wasn’t empty.  Even in the vacuum between the planets interstellar dust swirled in the hidden eddies of gravity and stellar wind.  And while humans couldn’t see that dust, or the various other particles that sleeted through space from the surface of their home world through dense layers of atmosphere, they did observe one thing: space was full of stars.

     Big ones, little ones, ones that burned so hot they ignited clouds of dust nearby into displays of brilliant light and searing x-rays, and lived lives measured in the millions of years.  And others that burned so cold it was hard to see them beside their brighter neighbors, pulsing dimly for billions and billons of years.  A multitude of them, giants and dwarves, blue-white and brown, a spectrum of existence being born in great nebular clouds of dust and gas, burning their lives out in the cold and uncaring reaches of interstellar vacuum before dying in a nova explosion of light and energy.

     While they lived, the great balls of compressed gas spun through the void at great speed, pushed and pulled by vagrancies of graviometric flux and the ever-surging currents of the interstellar wind.  But this day, in the briefest moment of time, there was one star that was moving faster than any other, a darting mote that streaked through space at several times the speed of light.

     Protected in her bubble of hyperspace, generated by the massive Sazaki-Hilliard XLS engines that hurtled her through time and space, the Pixie Traveler was a deep space scout outbound from the human colony on Icarus, Epsilon Sector, 57 light years distant from Sol and Earth.  Outbound in search of a star system identified by the Deep Space Exploration team on the Ikaris 7 station, in orbit around Icarus.

     A titanium and hybrid plastic bullet, the Pixie was the latest in a long series of craft developed and built for the sole purpose of exploring deep space as Humanity continued their slow expansion outward from their home world.  As such, she wasn’t much more than an armored shell wrapped around the intricate gyros and generators of the Sazaki-Hilliard drive, the XLS engines dominating her hindquarters.

     Nestled in front of the engines was the crew capsule, a snug space complete with inverted gravity sleeping tubes, a closet-sized head for toiletry and showering and an equally tiny galley for food preparation.  Connected to the crew capsule via a curt passageway, which doubled as storage for personal effects and equipment was the flattened U-shaped cockpit, stuffed with every monitor, display and device that the engineers could fit around the pilot and copilot’s chairs.  Feeding off the Pixie’s extensive sensor array, the monitors and displays were constantly spewing information out at whoever was occupying the cramped space.

     This afternoon it was Captain Karim Muhammad Abdul, a Ranger attached to DESE Scout Command, seconded military personnel utilized for deep space recon and exploration.  At 36, Captain Abdul had logged more time in space than any other two officers combined in Scout Command, a true veteran of interstellar travel.  That, unfortunately, did little to alleviate the boredom associated with long range scouting missions.

     Abdul let a slow sigh whistle out his nostrils as his eyes passed over the bank of monitors for perhaps the 100th time this duty shift, looking for anything different to announce the sensors had found what they were looking for.  That particular ‘what’ was a Sol-type system identified by DESE three months ago, within striking distance of Scout Command’s fleet of long-range scouts, like the Pixie.